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Designing a House with an Architect

It doesn't cost a lot of money for us to design you a home. While we can design $2,000,000 homes (and have done so on many occasions)  most of our clients are just the average everyday person, fairly simple and straight forward. The HOUSES ON THE RIGHT ARE CUSTOM HOMES we've designed for our clients, most under 2500 Square Feet. If you want to see a REAL WORLD EXAMPLE of how a client designs a house with us and THE COSTS involved  then CLICK HERE 

Article: How to Make Your Home Look Larger than your Neighbor for Minimal Expense 

As an Architect in designing homes for new clients, when they first come to me they have standard tastes you would see from any house you would see in any neighborhood. What I try to do is to expand their architectural vocabulary and be bold in what their trying to do, without spending a lot more money. Part of that is to make their house look bigger from the street and live bigger inside. You can get a lot of “wow” factor if try some simple things in your home design 

1.   Make your house longer, not square. Most people want to make their houses more square in design, in the preconceived notion of saving costs. While this may be overall true, it also makes your house very small looking (and boring). For a 2500 square foot house instead of designing it 50 foot by 50 foot, make your house longer like 75 foot long by 33 wide.  You’d be surprised how much more elegant and more expensive it looks for not that much more money. It also gives you a bonus of giving windows into almost every room in your home, giving light and visual space to them. 

2.   Use the Split level home concept. The split level home was more prevalent in the 1960’s than it is today, but it has a lot of advantages it you modernize it. First, in most areas of the northern part of the country, you need at least a 30” or deeper footing to get below the local frost line. Well, let that be the staring point of your basement (or as I like to call it, the Lower Level). That means the Lower Level is 2 feet below grade, which means you can have full size windows. The  Lower Level foundation wall is 30” tall, the rest of the wall height can be wood (whether 8’ or 9’ tall) If  you use 8’ tall lower level (to reduce costs) there is a design I like to use to eliminate bulkheads for HVAC, incorporate them in a floor truss system. I love to use 16’’ high floor trusses, 24” on center, and keeping the trusses in the same orientation throughout the house. It give plenty of space for the HVAC ducts. If you need space for the HVAC to “step over” each other, do that in the mechanical room. 

3.   With the split level home, The 2nd Floor (or the “Main Level” as I like to call it) it anywhere from 8 to 9 feet above grade, not only giving it a commanding view of the property all around, it also looks like a 2 story building, for a 1 story price. You can leave windows open at night because they are 10 feet above grade. You have a lot of visual privacy because people on the street don’t have a direct view into the house from the street. When you sit down They can’t see you, even with tons of windows. On the Main Level I love to use vaulted roof trusses to give more visual height in the rooms. 

4.   Use wide overhangs. Wide overhangs were more prevalent during the Prairie House period This may seem strange, but wide overhangs (like 4’ wide) make you house look bigger both inside and outside. I stated above, I love vaulted roof trusses. I start with an 8’ tall wall (rather than 9’). With a 4 foot overhang and vaulted roof trusses, the wall height on the inside is now 10’, with the ceiling peak at 15’. This is because the roof started going up further away from the exterior wall. I’m getting 10 to 15 foot ceilings for an 8 foot tall wall price. The wide overhangs also help in summer, by shielding the windows in shade, keeping direct sunlight outside. 

5.   Incorporate decks and screen porches into the design. Don’t make decks and screen porches an afterthought, but incorporate them into the design, that is, put brick or siding on them, put a roof over them, and make the openings look like windows, but don’t put in the glass. And consider putting them on the front of the house, not the rear. I designed a house for my parents which was 1300 square feet on the Main Level, but added the screen porch on the front of the house. The house was 72 feet long in the front (24’ screen porch, 16’ Great Room, 8’ Entry, 24’ Garage) and it looks huge. (if you want to see it, go to my Web Site (Web address down below), Home Page, near the middle of the page, “Click Here for More House Photos”, and it’s the first photo. The screen porch is to the left) The Screen Porch is finished in moisture resistant drywall, so it feels like any other room in the house, (it has vaulted ceilings) but it’s not heated or cooled. It is the most lived in space of the home. Having the screen porch or deck on the front of the home gives more community with your neighbors, while it can give you more privacy. On my home,  the deck has a solid wall from grade to 42” above the floor. This gives visual privacy when sitting down but I can converse with then neighbors when standing up (42” is also leaning height for your elbows). As a bonus, with the split level home, the space below the deck (since it has siding and the floor 7’ above grade) I have a 18 wide 28 foot long shed below the deck for lawn mowers, bikes, tools, which I don’t have to keep in the garage. 

6.   Downplay the garage. There’s nothing visually pleasing about a garage. The most important rooms of the home (Great Room, Dining Room, maybe the Screen Porch) should have the most visual presence on your home. Having a monster 24 foot by 36 foot garage sticking out the front of you house is not visually pleasing.  Set it back from the front of the home, and if you can, put toward the rear of the house. Use a side entry on the garage doors if you can. And put lots of normal windows like the rest of the house. Try to make it look like any other room from the street. By down playing the garage and making look like another room on your home, it’ll make your house seem bigger when it really isn’t.

7.   Use lots of repetitive windows. By using the same window size over and over in a long pattern, it’ll make the house seem longer. And these don’t need to be operable windows. Fixed windows are less expensive the operable windows.

Hopefully this will help you in your house design.

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